Editorial Content for Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

I probably should admit that I’m not much of a memoir reader. But when I read the premise of Aspen Matis’ GIRL IN THE WOODS, I knew I had to pick it up. I’ve long been fascinated by long-distance hiking (I have hiked the northern half of the oldest long-distance trail in America, Vermont’s Long Trail), and Aspen’s story of how her own thru-hiking experience enabled her to heal after trauma seemed like a homage of sorts to that other recently famous long-distance hiking memoir, Cheryl Strayed’s WILD. And although GIRL IN THE WOODS is hardly a perfect book, it’s a powerful story that is doing important work and can offer countless young women a model of one way to discover hidden strengths and resilience.

Aspen grew up as Debbie Parker in Newton, Massachusetts, a wealthy suburb of Boston. Her parents were both lawyers, her older brothers were handsome sports stars, and her mother, in particular, babied her so much as to almost be crippling. She dressed Aspen until she was in her teens, convinced her that she couldn’t swallow pills or put in contacts, and essentially raised her on a strict diet of learned helplessness from which Aspen was dying to escape.

"...a powerful story that is doing important work and can offer countless young women a model of one way to discover hidden strengths and resilience."

She had always loved hiking near her grandparents’ home in Colorado Springs, so she leapt at the opportunity to attend Colorado College. But when, on the second night at school, even before classes started, she was raped by another freshman, Aspen was paralyzed. What had she done to provoke the attack? Why did no one believe her? Why did her mom and brother have such disappointing responses when she got up the courage to tell them what she’d been through? Disinterested in college and too scared to trust anyone else, Aspen abruptly dropped out of school midway through her second semester and told her parents that she was setting out to hike the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, traveling through California, Oregon and Washington all the way from the Mexican border to the Canadian one.

Although Aspen was initially disappointed in what she perceived as her parents’ lack of support for her after her rape, they did support her as they knew how: by providing the best care packages on the trail, giving her a satellite phone and GPS tracker so that she could check in nightly, and sending her replacement shoes even before her old ones had fallen apart. But even with these creature comforts (which are all relative when you’re hiking 20 miles a day and sleeping on the ground), Aspen felt, for the first time in her life, a sense of self-reliance that might prove to be the key to her recovery.

Readers will find a fair amount to quibble with in Aspen’s account: her uncritical acceptance of the privileges that accompanied her upper-middle-class upbringing, her fixation on her own physical attractiveness and how to achieve beauty, her seemingly overriding desire for romantic attachment at a time when she should be most focused on her own independence.

That said, Aspen does offer young women --- regardless of whether they’ve experienced anything close to this level of trauma --- a road map for finding strength and a measure of independence. Heading out by oneself to the wilderness, to an environment where women hiking alone are remarkable in their individuality, does require a great deal of courage on Aspen’s part, and her persistence even through a variety of dangers --- of both the human and environmental kinds --- will provide inspiration for many.